I am a condensed matter theorist, and I work in strongly correlated systems. I am interested in the collective behavior of electrons. In some materials, electrons interact strongly, in which case the single electron picture may fail and what emerges is the collective mode of electrons. Exotic things such as fractionalization may happen. Examples include fractional quantum Hall systems, high temperature superconductors, et al. My focus is on studying models using both analytical and numerical methods to identify exotic behaviors in these strongly correlated models. Quantum materials are described by very complicated models, and we try to find simplified effective models, such as the Hubbard model and the t-J model, which we believe also capture the essential physics of many exotic behaviors of real materials such as high temperature superconductors.
Even though this type of model looks very simple, it is still very, very hard to solve. As a condensed matter physicist, I am fascinated by both the mathematical beauty and the predictive power of physics. I use analytical methods, such as field theory and exact solvable models to solve or guess solutions and to understand the physics behind the correlated models. By using numerical methods, I am trying to predict phases and phase transitions, and I am trying to see if there are exotic behaviors, such as fractionalizations in realistic models.